Joe Scanlan

“Is Terry Richardson an Artist or a Predator?” NY Mag follows Terry Richardson around and gives a thorough report on his skeezy, idiotic past. It’s a good primer on all the various lawsuits against him. [The Cut]

The Frick is getting supersized; Peter Schjeldahl approves. The position reads as arbitrary. [The New Yorker]

Joe Scanlan is a white male artist who hires black female actors to play his character Donelle Woolford, a hot young artist who gets a leg up in the art world because of her race. Needless to say, when “Donelle Woolford” was asked to participate in the Whitney Biennial, this led to a slew of protests; Yams, a mostly queer black artist/poet/musician collective, even withdrew from the Biennial. Now Ryan Wong claims that he is Joe Scanlan, and the character was created to deflect this kind of rampant deafness. We gather that this is a joke since Scanlan has a faculty bio on Yale’s website, but Wong’s analysis of Scanlan’s “apology” letter sounds familiar. [Hyperallergic]

Speaking of Joe Scanlan, Carolina Miranda’s epic summary is the last word on the Donelle Woolford. Her thorough, even-handed report includes some interesting quotes from Jennifer Kidwell, who plays Woolford, and has otherwise almost been left out of the debate entirely. [LA Times]

MoMA has added a downloadable app to its design collection; Bjork’s 2011 album “Biophilia” which was made available as an app with visualizations too. [Culture: High & Low]

This year alone, Germany doubled government funding for recovering Nazi-looted art to to 4 million Euros. [Deutsche Welle]

Jerry Saltz on zombie abstraction. Meh, we’ve all been talking about how process-based abstraction has taken over the art world for a while. Not too much new here. [Vulture]

Karen Rosenberg is amazed at Kara Walker’s curatorial ability because she likes both music and art. Rosenberg writes: “Who else would think to compare the Notorious B.I.G.’s ‘Ten Crack Commandments’ and F. T. Marinetti’s ‘Manifesto of Futurism,’ as she does in her introduction to ‘Ruffneck Constructivists’?” [New York Times]

The Joan Mitchell Foundation has created a new artists’ retreat in New Orleans! But wait: The facilities still need to be built and will cost approximately $16.5 million. [Nonprofit Quarterly]

Two Trees Cultural Space Subsidy Program is open to non-profits and artists with a strong exhibition record. The spaces are located in DUMBO and are offered at $12 per foot per year, with a three-year lease. That’s well below market. [Two Trees]

Yesterday, Paddy Johnson interviewed the Theo Westenberger Estate, which is giving out tons of money and resources for artists. (Photographers, we’re talking to you.) They’ve just announced the that Gaea Woods is the winner of their 2014 photo contest, which gives out $5,000 in unrestricted funds. [Facebook]

The Cat Show at White Columns has everything and nothing to do with cats. Everything, because most of the 134 artworks show cats or cat-related ephemera—like litter boxes, scratching posts, or yarn. Nothing, because the themes of many of these works aren’t about cats at all.

New York Conversations is a text film. Shot in a Chinatown storefront converted for this occasion into an improvised kitchen/restaurant, the film documents three days of public conversations between artists, critics, curators, and a free floating public. The talks, lunches, and dinners were organized by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Nico Dockx, and Anton Vidokle in response to an invitation by Brussels-based art journal A Prior to be the subject of their new issue. Instead of commissioning essays or producing artwork to be printed in the journal, the artists decided to rethink the structure by which an art publication is produced and to attempt to do this discursively in a public setting.